Lou Gerig's most enduring memories of Jim Brady center not so much on the bullet that nearly took the former presidential press secretary's life and left him in a wheelchair, but on the zinging wit that was Brady's hallmark.

Brady died Monday, 33 years after he was gravely wounded when a gunman tried to kill President Ronald Reagan. Brady was 73.

Gerig, a native Hoosier who previously had been press secretary for Sen. Richard Lugar, was working for Brady in March 1981 to coordinate contacts with media outside of Washington, D.C.

Now president and partner with Sease, Gerig & Associates in Indianapolis, Gerig met Brady in about 1978 when they worked for Republican senators — Gerig for Lugar and Brady for Bill Roth of Delaware.

Gerig recalled that he was rushing to a meeting for new Republican press secretaries in 1978, arrived late and was waved over by Brady, whom he hadn't known previously. It was the the beginning of a friendship ... and a partnership in a few politically motivated media hijinks manipulated by Brady.

Once, Gerig recalled, Brady enlisted him for a news conference aimed at criticizing President Jimmy Carter's budget. The participants were to show up in shirt sleeves with armbands and green eyeshades, to look like accountants, with a 6-foot pair of scissors Brady procured. They were to call themselves the "Save Our Bucks" Task Force.

"And of course, Washington being all about acronyms, that became the SOBs," Gerig recalled. And that bit of strategy got the story on the front page of the New York Times, Washington Post and other newspapers.

"It was theater," Gerig acknowledged. And it showed Brady's shrewdness, and his ability give people a chuckle while directing them to the serious point he — or his boss — wanted to make.

On the morning of the shooting, Gerig had taken a public bus part of the way to work and Brady had picked up him for the rest of the ride to the White House. Gerig and his wife had tickets to a Gaither Family concert that night and didn't want two cars in the city.

Brady and Gerig chatted about sports, their families and what they planned to do that day.

They could not have known.

Gerig was at the White House when word came that Reagan, Brady and two others had been shot. He did not leave work until the next evening.

For a little over a year after the shooting, Gerig continued to work at the White House. He moved briefly to the Treasury Department, and then back to Indianapolis.

"Brady was my horse," he said. "Nobody else knew me."

They kept in touch. The Brady family lived in Delaware for many years, and when the Gerig family would vacation each year at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, they would get together.

At those informal meetings, it was clear that despite it all, Brady had not lost his sense of humor, Gerig said. Examples?